Hey, I've got a pipe dream for you: Mac OS X remote login, with Aqua. Meaning graphic primitives actually sent on the network and rendered on the client. Cocoa would have to be heavily altered since it is impractical for certain kinds of primitives, but I've been dreaming about a comeback of thin clients for a long time.I'd love to have a choice between email&browsing locally on my Macbook Air and remote login on my Mac Pro for heavy duty stuff and VNC solutions (transmitting the actual screenshot over the network) really aren't pretty.

Still, I think we as a community need to come up with some new Apple-related pipe dreams.

My vote for new Apple-related pipe dream is a stereo display and UI system. Don't know when it's coming, but considering all the work Apple's doing in the field (see all their recent 3D patent apps), they have to have something in the works.

Convertible dual-mode tablet. Regular OS X as laptop, Mobile OS X in tablet form. With optional e-ink display. (I'm seriously thinking about a Kindle just for all the electronic documents I have to read.)

That's exactly not what he wants, cause that's just VNC protocol. He wishes for something better, like RDP on Windows, which is great.

Or NX Server which is also fantastic (for linux nerds). RDP is a nice rarely-mentioned feature of Windows.

I once compiled the opensource part of NX Server (freeNX) on Mac OS X, but probably it lacked the goodness of the commercial version somehow.

Anyway, the nonexistence of this sort of thing on Mac OS X was part of a dealbreaker with (undisclosed) us and Apple, and Apple hinted that they had a citrix-like thing by a third party to show us last fall, but it never happened. So maybe someday?

Hey, I've got a pipe dream for you: Mac OS X remote login, with Aqua. Meaning graphic primitives actually sent on the network and rendered on the client. Cocoa would have to be heavily altered since it is impractical for certain kinds of primitives, but I've been dreaming about a comeback of thin clients for a long time.I'd love to have a choice between email&browsing locally on my Macbook Air and remote login on my Mac Pro for heavy duty stuff and VNC solutions (transmitting the actual screenshot over the network) really aren't pretty.

I'd second this. I also don't think it is that unlikely:(a) Apple has taken the first step towards acknowledging that people want this with Screen Sharing in Leopard. I think many of us have now used this enough to help out friends and family to like the idea, and to hate the sluggishness.(b) Meanwhile this concept (remote GUI) is one of the few places left where MS can say, and justifiably so, that they do a *substantially* better job than Apple. Sure, this being MS, what they offer doesn't come with any of the usability (hooking into iChat etc) of Apple, but technically it is far superior.(c) Doing this right hooks into Apple's further long-term goals. Doing it right means that rather than the current system:-app makes a drawing call which-is translated into pixels by PPC/x86 code running within that app, and then the pixels-are copied to the window server which-composites them (using the graphics card) against what's already on screen.

We replace this with -app makes a drawing call which-passes the request to the window server which-has the graphics card calculate the pixels and composite them.

We can then replace this final layer with a network proxy that routes the requests to a remote graphics card, and we have what we want.This architecture also probably gives us better performance since more work is done on the graphics card. On the negative side it is rather more of a hassle for Apple to debug (to put it mildly).

Now this idea (do the pixel generation on the graphics card) has been bandied around ever since Quartz Extreme (which moved composition onto the GPU). But it hasn't yet happened, apparently because Apple has been worried about the GPU results not being pixel-for-pixel equivalent to the CPU generated results.So what's new to make it more likely now?

(a) if we're abandoning older macs, we're abandoning older GPUs that may have caused problems(b) this may help rather more, in terms of usability, for iPhone than desktop, and it makes sense as part of a general rationalization of the various OSs(c) resolution independence is going to be a whole lot more disruptive (in terms of pixel-for-pixel equivalence) than doing this work on the GPU, so we might as well take advantage of the disruption.

It's also the kind of flashy gee-whiz feature that Jobs likes to demo, even though it actually fits in well with the concept of Snow Leopard as a Leopard with the minor niggling issues fixed up and done right.